What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses personalized emails to tell your email list about your product or services. This is a strategy to increase subscribers and monthly revenue. It’s important to note that email marketing is different than spam. When done right, email marketing has the potential to create high levels of trust with your audience while increasing engagement and conversions.
It is an excellent way of digital marketing because it allows marketers to reach a changing market. Email campaigns can convert prospects into customers and turn occasional buyers into repeat customers. It is also a very popular form of digital communication for companies in various industries.
Email marketing is the most powerful way of making a direct connection with your leads and nurturing them until they buy. It consistently beats out all of the other marketing techniques out there.
Why Email Marketing is Important?
Email marketing remains the most effective way to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty. While social media platforms like Facebook and unsolicited spam email have caused email marketers some headaches, overall, it’s clear that this type of marketing is still the king.
There are some reasons why email marketing should be one of the top priorities:
- Email is the communication channel- It’s hard to look away from your inbox – with just over 80% of people checking it every day, it’s the world’s most popular communication channel.
- You own your list- Your Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts can be deleted for any reason without any notice. However, your email list belongs to you. No one can take away your leads from you.
- Email just converts better -Statistics show that people who receive email marketing spend 138% more than those who don’t. Overall, email marketing offers an ROI of 4400%. That’s incredible. And, if you’re wondering if social media can convert better than email, think again because emails do a 3x better job at increasing order value.
Email marketing is a powerful tactic for making sales online. In this article we’ll explore how to make the most of email marketing, starting with the basics.
How to start with an Email Marketing Campaign?
It can be a bit overwhelming to get started with email marketing, but with just a couple of small changes, we can become a pro.
You don’t need to spend hours on individual emails, as long as you know what your goal is and follow a basic email marketing process. Essentially, all you need is to figure out the type of content you want to write in advance, then collect information that supports that point of view.
1. Email Campaign Goal
Knowing what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign is essential. What do you want people to do when they read it? Do you just want them to sign up for a newsletter list or are you looking for an ongoing Customer relationship?
What is your goal for the email? What do you want your contacts to do when they see the email?
Some goals that can be set-up for email campaigns are brand awareness, website traffic, revenue generated and leads generated.
If you know the goal of your campaign and what you hope to accomplish, this will help focus the efforts and make it more achievable. This will provide tangible benefits. Email campaign goals should be aligned with the larger goals of business and should have a positive impact.
2.Target Audience
Your business probably has a diverse customer base, each with its own needs and preferences.
For better conversions, you should segment your subscribers for each campaign. You can segment subscribers based on a variety of factors — from age, gender, and location to interests, preferences, engagement levels, and online activity.
Once you’ve defined your email audience, it’s time to craft an engaging, conversion-focused email that helps you achieve your goal.
3.Email Campaign Type
There are many different types of emails that brands send out to achieve specific goals. These emails tend to work best with certain audiences and goals, so it’s important to look into the data to choose a type of email.
Some popular email campaign types every marketer should know:
• Welcome email
A welcome email is always a good idea, especially when they are the first mail newcomers receive after signing up for your list.
• Cart abandonment campaigns
These campaigns are emails sent to people who visited the store, added some items to their cart but then left without completing the purchase.
• Newsletters
These are one of the most popular types of email campaigns and brands often use them to keep their subscribers updated on what’s happening in the industry.
• Re-engagement emails
These emails are focused on customers who have been disengaged for a particular amount of time. They increase their chances of staying in touch with your brand.
4.Perfect Timings to Send Email
Timing is crucial for email marketing campaigns. New email campaigns has risk of being lost in the inbox. If they are sent out either early in the morning or late evenings when most people are sleeping or are busy.
To get as many people to open your emails as possible, you need to consider the timing and frequency. Emails sent out mid-morning and weekdays work best. depending on the target audience
The right time for the target audience can vary depending on where they live and what time zone they’re in. Make sure to take their location and time zone into account before scheduling your emails
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Tips to create a successful email marketing campaign
But before you start, here are tips and best practices to help you make your email marketing campaigns a success.
1.Relevant Email List
To have maximum impact through emails, one needs to make sure that emails are delivered to the right people. Unethical ways to collect emails, such as buying email lists, are not only bad for engagement and conversion rates, but they can get emails to be blocked or marked as spam by email service providers (ESPs.)
2.Design your Email
Email might contain some great content, but if it is not formatted well and looks messy then it can easily get ignored. Keep it short, but interesting A shorter email can be more concise and informative than a longer one.
3.Personalize Email Subject Line and Content
With personalized email, one can easily customize messages to suit each subscriber’s needs. It allows to grow your relationship with subscribers by giving them a feeling of being valued and important. Personalization is a way of tailoring your email’s subject line or design to each recipient.
4.Be Conversational
Consumers are fed up with the barrage of emails they get from all sorts of brands. Companies should be more sensitive to this and reconsider the way their content is coming across.
To communicate with your customers on a personal level. One needs to build relationships and make them feel like part of the team. Keep your emails friendly, approachable, and conversational.
5.Follow-ups
Following up with a few more email shots can help you nurture your subscriber base, which will increase your conversion rate and widen open rates. This can be applied to various email campaign types. Follow-up emails should have a gap between each email and the number of emails sent should be limited.
6.Emails from a Real Person
The wrong type of email address can come across as people receiving a generic, automated email from your company. Use a recognizable sender name so that the email lands in your inbox and sounds more like a human.
7.A/B Test your Emails
There is no such thing as the “perfect” email. But you can get close to creating one by testing emails before sending them out. Testing emails is a good way to improve marketing campaigns and a better understanding of the audience.
How to track the success of email campaigns
One of the best benefits of email marketing is that it can be continuously tracked and there is scope to improve campaigns to ensure that personalized messages are sent for maximum impact.
Most email marketing tools offer in-depth analytics and statistics so one can see if their emails are having the desired effect or not.
Some key metrics to track email campaigns:
• Open rate: This shows the typical number of opens for each of the emails. Through this, we can evaluate the success of email subject lines, sender names, and pre-header text using open rates.
• Click-through rate: Click-through rate reveals the typical quantity of clicks subscribers made on the links or CTAs in the emails. An essential statistic for assessing email engagement is the click-through rate.
• Bounce rate: It shows the number of contacts who did not receive an email. A high bounce rate may be a sign that the email list contains inactive, wrong or out-of-date contacts, or it may be a sign that you need to switch email service providers.
• Unsubscribes: It shows how many people have removed their names from the subscriber list. High unsubscribe rates may be a sign that your subscribers do not find the content of your emails interesting or that the wrong people are receiving them.
• Spam complaints: It gives the data how frequently emails have been flagged as spam. This may be the result of spammy email subject lines, useless email content, unsolicited emails, or problems with email marketing software.
To feel confident in your marketing efforts, it’s important to analyze the metrics and goals. Decide what is most important to track and avoid going overboard with data overload.
Tracking Revenue from Email
After investing time and effort into drafting an email and sending it to the subscribers. It is important to know whether the email was effective or not. It is vital to justify marketing spending with your company. Marketing budgets are limited, so it’s important to demonstrate value by tracking ROI, maintaining quality standards, and practicing customer-centric pricing strategies.
• Click-through sales
This strategy tracks revenue from a directed click in an email to your site, which eventually leads the customer to convert. It typically requires the use of a web analytics tool to capture coded links, from the email click to the website, to purchase. The downside to using email is it can only track immediate purchases. It fails to accurately show the upside potential long-term effect if the user alters their purchase path for a different product.
• Single-touch attribution
Web analytics is a method that measures and calculates the traffic on websites. It can tell you how many visitors your website has, what they looked at, how long they looked at it for etc.
First touch- A prospective customer clicks on a search ad, visits your site and subscribes to email.
Last touch-This approach assumes that preceding actions were responsible for the conversion.
• Weighted attribution
Some marketers use a combination of methods by weighing each associated touch.
• Match-back analysis
A match-back analysis doesn’t require any web analytics. This sales tracking method takes all sales that were generated at some point after the email campaign and compares them against all the email recipients. It will then distinguish which recipients completed a purchase.
• Offer code redemptions
Tracking offers or promotion codes that were used in an email promotion is a good way to gauge the revenue driven by the email. To do this, you need unique offer codes for your outreach channel.
• Test group method
This method, you establish a random sample of recipients that do not receive an email offer while a test group does receive it. After a time, compare revenue generated from each group to determine if there is a true lift from individuals receiving the email.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a great way to get people to your site, but it still requires some effort. One can see great returns and find that it doesn’t have to be hard at all! There is no set formula for succeeding with email automation. The best you can do is find what works for you and your company’s voice and style.
In the end, once you are comfortable with the basics, start to segment your emails and analyze your results. Email targeting allows sending different emails to different groups so that everything is more interesting for the readers.
